


Merely A Sweeper

by karanguni



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-15
Updated: 2008-02-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:21:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's always someone better than you, except where there isn't. Lu Tze, and the fact that this time, the apprentice really <i>has</i> outdone the master.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Merely A Sweeper

Humility was something Lu Tze never really paid much mind to. It was as bad as pride - there was no more point in telling the world that you were trying _really_ hard to hide how good you were than in trying _really_ hard to show that you were better than everybody else. There's always someone better than you.

Except where there isn't.

Lu Tze, as a novice, didn't know the meaning of the word "limits". There were plenty of people in the valley who tried to teach him the importance of being lower on the pecking order of bald monks than they were, but very few who tried to actually _teach_ him anything he hadn't already figured out himself.

Lu Tze didn't really think that he was _talented_. The others just weren't trying hard enough, or his teachers were just being daft and slow (more likely both at the same time), or the chief acolyte had something against him (definitely true). There's always someone better than you, they kept telling him.

Once upon a time, Lu Tze was a very young and very frustrated man of twenty, and about then they told him, "There is always someone better than you," and _then_ he'd asked the question, "Oh, really? Who?"

-

Lu Tze took his time tending to his volcanoes. No rush when you have all the time in the world. His tiny rake went up and down the slope of a puffing conical midget just about to erupt, and he turned its plate so that it would get a bit more sun. A few other pots had already been seen to, but there was one more still to go; a new one.

Lu Tze picked up a pair of tiny shears just large enough to fit his fingers and looked, a little dispassionately, down at the little flowering cherry tree grinning up at him. It was already taller than his largest bonsai mountain, and fifty years early for its first fruiting. Small green buds were beginning to poke their faces out into the sun. 'Pruning you,' the sweeper said, snipping the air, 'never seems to work.'

Lu Tze wasn't _disgruntled_. He who cannot master his bonsai lets his bonsai master him. He just found it irritating how much anything touched by Lobsang seemed to fail to grow to the right _size_ , or even the right shape. The pot restricted the tree's roots - or, at least, it should have. Instead of growing proportionately tiny, the thing had sprung up like a hyperactive sapling left out in a festering compost heap. Lu Tze'd tried starving it (no fertilizer for you), stabbing at it (you didn't need that root anyway), tying it down (who says branches should grow out and up?) and very nearly tried taking it hostage (if you grow anymore, I'll throw you down the Oi Dong valley).

All that time did was encourage the little bastard.

Lu Tze was faintly aware that he was walking down the wrong Way and straight into a Dead End, for was it not written, Only Crazy People Talk To Themselves? But he could afford to make an exception. After 800 years, he figured he was allowed to go just a bit barmy.

One tiny branch dropped onto the bench, and then another.

-

The sweeper found himself in the Abbot's room at sundown. The Abbot was a good man, one of only two whom Lu Tze respected in the world.* Lu Tze wondered, quietly just in case it showed on his face, whether going through puberty nine times in one's life gave one a certain fortitude against the raging, screaming, rebelling beast of adolescence. The way the Abbot was looking at him made Lu Tze wonder _really hard_.

'You wanted to see me, reverend one?'

'I happened to look out my window today,' the Abbot said, 'and saw you tending to your gardens.'

'Yes, reverend one,' Lu Tze deadpanned, because if the Abbot was going to be thick with him it was his formal duty as the man's friend to show him that two could play at this game. 'I was. As I have each and every day for the last 350 years.'

The Abbot shot him a withering look as only a full blooded teenaged boy could. 'Time's son cannot be insolent towards me, but _you_ can, Sweeper?' His hair, Lu Tze noticed, was trying very hard not to obey the laws of requisite baldness that were being imposed upon it. The Abbot's head now looked like a sort of dark, fuzzy peach.

'Merely making my point, my lord,' Lu Tze said, at least trying to look repentant for their friendship's sake.

'I'm worried about you, Lu Tze,' the Abbot said, which was being unfair. Lu Tze stopped to listen. There was no other choice. 'Do you remember when you first went to find your Way?'

'Is this a history lesson?' Lu Tze asked, attempting not to let the exasperation enter his voice. 'Yes, I remember. It was hundreds of years ago, but I remember when I got kicked out because no one could teach me, and I also remember about all the bits where you wanted to throttle me for having too much cheek. Yes?'

'Please don't try any verbal _upsi dazi_ on me, Lu Tze,' the Abbot sighed, managing - impressively - to sound his full age. 'What happened the year before you left?'

'You became the Abbot, Abbot,' Lu Tze said. His hands itched for a broom. Brooms were simple. Brooms didn't try to talk around you in circles. Brooms were his true friends.

'That too,' the Abbot said thoughtfully, 'but that's not what I'm talking about.'

Lu Tze paused, his mind going back through the dusty filing cabinet of his memories. 'I hit the Valley slicing time,' he said eventually, shrugging.

'You sliced farther than anyone had sliced before,' the Abbot corrected him. 'You sliced beyond the Valley. And the year before that?'

'How does this all matter?' Lu Tze sighed, crossing his arms. The Abbot looked at him passively. Lu Tze refused to have less patience than a fifteen year old. 'I don't know, reverend one. Did I make the chief acolyte cry?'

'You did, in fact. You corrected him in front of his entire class of third level _dongs_. And the year before that you crept into the seventh dojo and wiped all the windows because you could not stand the dust.'

'Eighth dojo,' Lu Tze corrected the Abbot before he could help himself. Damn damn damn. The Abbot was looking passive, which was his way of acting smug.

'And the year before that you stopped looking for me after your daily chores because you had learnt all that you could learn from me.'

'No,' Lu Tze shook his head. 'Because I got _bored_. You had much more than that to teach me, but I really don't care for the fiddly bits of time-flux dynamics, reverend one.'

'More like you didn't need to know them,' the Abbot countered. 'You never got _bored_ with anything that would have challenged you, Lu Tze. You never stopped until you took yourself out of the system entirely. Went to find your own Way, where you were both the best and the worst and nothing about being good or bad or better mattered.'

Lu Tze stared at the Abbot. At 923 years old, it seemed an entirely inappropriate time for the man to be going through a sort of mid-life crisis involving sudden emotional heart-to-hearts with his subordinates.

'You were cutting off branches from your bonsai, Sweeper. Off the bonsai that your apprentice gave you.'

'It's growing too fast,' Lu Tze said dumbly, remembering to close his mouth.

'It's growing as fast as it ought to grow. But it's growing faster than _you_ can keep up with,' the Abbot said. 'Just like your apprentice.'

Lu Tze's expression went stony.

'You are only human, Lu Tze.' The Abbot was trying to be gentle. That was almost as bad as him trying to be direct, or maybe it was worse. 'He's only _mostly_ human. There are certain physical limitations that the body must obey --'

'He still had a body when he sliced time finer than the space between two pennies in the hands of an Ankh Morpokian beggar!' Lu Tze snapped. 'It shouldn't have been possible, Wen's son or not.'

'Why?' the Abbot asked archly. 'Because _you_ couldn't?'

Lu Tze felt something go heavy in his stomach. Meeting the Abbot's eyes was suddenly very difficult to do.

'Don't turn your achievements into a mere measurement of what you _couldn't_ do, Sweeper,' the Abbot said, putting a hand on his friend's shoulder just as Lu Tze started thinking about the first Clock, and then the second Clock, and now the fact that he was jealous of the thief of time. 'There is a time and place for everything and everyone, Lu Tze.'

Outside, the blossoms on the trees had long returned to normal: the eternal bloom of the eternally surprised. It's something only an apprentice - a damned good apprentice - could have done.

'Maybe I should go back to the city,' Lu Tze said. 'For is it not written, "I'm too old for all of this"?'

The Abbot chuckled.

'They still don't understand your Way, Sweeper.'

'Oh, really? Page 33. "Some things just can't be helped".'

Well. Well _damn_.

If there was one thing about the Abbot that proved the man's age, it was his ability to laugh quietly in the wake of Lu Tze's quiet, awkward shame.

There's always someone better than you. And Lu Tze? Lu Tze was merely a sweeper. Nothing more, and nothing less, with nothing to do with being worse, or better, or best.

  
* contestible, since Mrs Cosmopolite was _probably_ a woman.


End file.
